The Top 5 Benefits Of Meditation For Men

David is a strength coach and bestselling Men's Health author. You can follow him at HowToBeast.com.

Meditation is quite possibly the biggest quick fix for your life that you’re neglecting. The actual time and self discipline required to mediate is miniscule in comparison to other important activities like working, exercising, approaching women, sleeping, or simply reading a book. However, it offers just as many, if not more benefits than any of them. You’re effectively shooting yourself in the foot if you skip out on meditation.

My experience with meditation is admittedly limited. I’ve been meditating pretty consistently for two years, and the mediation that I practice is very basic. All I do is lay on my back, with my arms and legs spread out slightly to my sides, and focus on my breathing for about ten minutes. I inhale through my nose and breathe in deep into my belly, and then I breathe out fully, again exhaling through my nose. Here are the six top benefits I’ve experienced from doing this almost every day:

1. It allows you to better analyze situations you’ve gotten too close to

We all let bullshit get to our head. Whether it’s the raise you’re about to ask for, the girlfriend who’s trying to pick a fight with you, the roommate who’s not paying his dues, or something else. There tends to be one or two unsettling things on our minds at any point in time. And it’s common for small things to grow into a big deal in our minds when our lives are relatively tranquil.

When this happens, we start to let the situation cloud our mental clarity. It gradually takes over our conscious mind until we’re having compulsive thoughts about it every few minutes. And these thoughts tend to repetitive – they aren’t solving anything or making it any better. Furthermore, they ruin our mood and whatever else we happen to be doing.

Meditation serves to distance you from these issues. By taking a break from thinking about them for a few minutes, you’ll return with a grounded perspective. It’s common for me to forget about these things completely or immediately think of a quick course of action to address them upon finishing a meditation.

2. It resets you to a calm, collected demeanor

When we allow the compulsive thoughts mentioned above to crowd our mind, it makes us agitated and angry. Or sad and lethargic. Meditation allows you to take a step back and view your life for what it really is. And that fresh perspective not only allows you to better address the problems at hand, but it also serves to put your body and mind at ease. Once you’ve gained a clearer insight, you can proceed with the weight of the bullshit lifted off your shoulders.

3. It prepares you to move forward with renewed energy and creativity

By clearing your mind of the problems and the fog, meditation gives you a blank slate. I commonly experience my most productive period of the day just after meditating. I believe this is because I’m able to remove the thoughts of girls, desires, worries, and irrelevant goals from my mind for a brief time. During this time I’m able to fully engage my mind in the task at hand, and I crush it as a result.

4. It physiologically improves the state of your body

This means that meditating literally changes how your body is functioning. Among the many positive changes it’s been show to lower oxygen consumption, decrease respiratory rate, increase blood flow, and slow the heart rate. Like the other benefits, these changes are acute and immediate.

5. It improves your regular breathing

When performing the mediation I recommend above, you’re consciously focusing on breathing fully and deeply the entire time. In the moment this serves to grant you all of the above benefits. What it also does is translate to your breathing when not meditating. By breathing like this while going about your day to day activities it will keep you “out of your head”, and instead focused and in touch with your body. Whenever I catch myself getting worked up or anxious about something, a little focused breathing usually offers immediate relief.

All of these benefits combine to enhance the life of any man. Take ten minutes out of your day and meditate. It will pay you back tenfold. Whether it’s by decreasing your stress level, increasing your focus and energy, or simply requiring you to be disciplined and sit there for ten minutes, it will change you for the better.

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61 Responses

Thank you for addressing some of the benefits of meditation. It’s a topic I’m very interested in.

I have gotten a lot out of my meditation practices. I was in Nepal for a month and stayed at a Buddhist monastery where I had an opportunity to meditate from sunrise to sunset every day. I also meditate as a part of my daily yoga practice.

I especially find yoga nidra very beneficial as it helps me go deep into my practice very quickly.

One of the biggest benefits I’ve had is being able to practice being present. Prior to practicing meditation, I was much more likely to be preoccupied with thinking about the past or about the future (usually thoughts about regret, what I could have done differently, what other people may have thought about what I said or did or fearful thoughts) instead of being in the now where I am more balanced, focused and centred, and a much more potent force in the world.

I understand the policy of this website, but what the heck is wrong with a woman making a post here that is perfectly fine? Believe me, I agree with almost everything this website stands for, but I’m getting sick of all of this ban women stuff.

Many of the principles of this website resonate with me, and I was interested in improving the relationship with the men in my life.

I thought it would be beneficial interacting with some of the members on here, but I’m now aware of your policy banning women and (and those responding to women) from participating in discussions in this website and will respect that decision.

Get the fuck out, you attention whore. Can’t you retarded women leave men alone for even 5 minutes without trying to invade male-only space? THis is one of the very few sites that is supposed to be a male only space. The fact that you dumb cunts keep trying to invade it show that you are just an attention whore who probably didn’t get enough attention from daddy.

I never understood this meditation business. Sleeping does all the benefits for me. It does put conscious mind be put aside for a time whereas I’m not sure whether it’s true with meditation. You can not stop thinking with thinking that you’re meditating.

It saves you energy by stopping your mind from wandering. Usually your mind wanders someplace negative, which influences your physical actions, and you find yourself doing something unproductive that would have been prevented had your mind been still to begin with.

And then, if you need to brainstorm, you have more mental energy available.

It’s the difference between walking a straight line between point a and point b, versus doing a series of perpendicular shuttle runs to get to the same place.

It’s mostly a prayer substitute. It’s secular people who recoil from Christianity but have an unmet spiritual need. They’re ignorant of the Christian meditation traditions, but they’re also ignorant enough about Buddhism not to recoil from that. So they cherry pick bits of Buddhist prayer.

Listen, all the yoga and meditation classes that a lot of urban girls go to today are shit. They are all modern pussified versions of the real ancient Indian practices. Real yoga/meditation is like a challenge, just like working out is. It requires extreme mental discipline, which is why some Indian masters spend their entire lifetimes in this pursuit. It is the furthest thing from “girly”. Most people’s minds are like a lake surface, with all sorts of thoughts constantly rippling across it and thus creating distractions and lowering the efficiency of your intelligence. That’s why so many people today can’t focus on something for more than 2 minutes. Meditation will increase your attention span, improve your concentration abilities, and allow you to think more creatively and logically. If you still doubt it, do some quick Google searches and give it a try and see for yourself.

Classical Martial arts originate in China, mainly in the Shaolin Temple where the Monk Boddhidarma sejourned. Along with him he brought Yoga from India and taught it to the shaolin monks in order to toughen and regenerate their body. This in turn was transformed to the Shaolin Martial arts and series of exercises to extend health and longevity.
Yoga/Martial Arts/Zen and meditation are all in fact manly exercises who originate from the same tree of physical and mental fortitude, conditioning your body, your mind, regulate your emotions and become a more aware individual.
The current versions you see right now of yoga, meditation, and all the so called spiritual practices, authors and books are part of what I call the “spiritual bullshitters”. Watered down versions for troubled people, creating that aberration that I call the “empowered woman” Or the “free spirit bullshit”. A woman in tight yoga pants, that lets her mustache and armpit hair grow, wearing mismatched ugly colored clothes and her faggot male counterpart that has a similar attire, an obsession for music instead of work and his idea of exercise is stretching. Avoid these people like the pest, they will destroy whatever ambitions you have just by being in your vicinity.

Don’t read the new age meditation and spiritual bullshit authors. Instead read the works and biographies of the great martial arts masters, Zen masters, the Taoist masters and others. I recommend learning about their lives and practices. Did you know that the founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba used to wrestle with horses, that at fifty he was the “peak of his physical condition” due to his unimaginably intense (in other words crazy) physical and mental training. They don’t teach you that in the watered down, modern day, western version of Aikido full of gossiping girls and men that don’t lift.

The same goes for every eastern practice. It is far far from beta. Truly saddening what they have been turned into.

i dunno. for the most part, the yoga classes i’ve gone to here in denver have been pretty challenging. most yoga classes will have you go through a few vinyasa sequences, warrior poses, chair poses, things like that. none of those are easy to hold for more than a few seconds, and if they are, you need to go deeper into the pose and push yourself harder. i’ve known plenty of guys who lift or do MMA and compliment their training with yoga, and they’re not going to india to do it.

haven’t seen too many hairy, ugly girls in yoga class either. they tend to be the type that eats healthy and exercises, and many are quite beautiful.

i did read somewhere that hatha yoga (the type with poses we do in the west) is just one small branch of what is considered yoga in india, and that the ancient masters described it as a series of torture poses designed to strengthen the body to withstand hours of sitting motionless in meditation. i do notice that most of the yoga chicks don’t like that quote, because the word torture brings “bad energy” or something like that.

The Universe is an illusion. It’s a holodeck. It’s imagination made real.

With eyes shut, meditation breaks the illusion. Now the only thing to deal with is your mind. Close your eyes, relax with breathing, then let your mind run free the way you do when you lay your head down at night to sleep. What will happen is the chattering of the mind will drift off to somewhere else, leaving a vacuum in your consciousness. As nature abhors a vacuum, something will come in to fill it. This is where the true benefits of meditation pay off. If there’s something you don’t understand, or know, ask before the mediation begins. Then go through this process. When the silence and vacuum stage are reached, the Universe will deliver information to help you understand what you’ve asked about.

Breathing deeply is exactly the opposite of what you want to do for the purposes of clearing your head. You want to breathe as minimaly as possible. Bag breathing can be helpful. Practicing static holding of the breath as long as you can is also great. Way, way better than deliberately taking deep breathes.

That’s where you get to. I practiced pranayama for around a year – when you first start it’s best to work with the four-fold breath. That is, a 16 second cycle in 4 equal stages of inhale/hold/exhale/hold. There is really no limit to how long this cycle can take. After a few months of consistent practice, a minute breathing pattern is sustainable during mundane waking life. While beginning, a ten minute meditation session could constitute some 40 breaths. That becomes 20, then 10, then 5. Eventually, one can maintain a single breath for 10 minutes.

The Dalai Lama purportedly received a vision from the Buddha after a day long breath.

I will repost my response to a guy who commented earlier, because I feel that some of you may have the same viewpoint (which was that meditation is girly and has no useful benefits). This was my response to that:

Listen, all the yoga and meditation classes that a lot of urban girls go to today are shit. They are all modern pussified versions of the real ancient Indian practices. Real yoga/meditation is like a challenge, just like working out is. It requires extreme mental discipline, which is why some Indian masters spend their entire lifetimes in this pursuit. It is the furthest thing from “girly”. Most people’s minds are like a lake surface, with all sorts of thoughts constantly rippling across it and thus creating distractions and lowering the efficiency of your intelligence. That’s why so many people today can’t focus on something for more than 2 minutes. Meditation will increase your attention span, improve your concentration abilities, and allow you to think more creatively and logically. If you still doubt it, do some quick Google searches and give it a try and see for yourself.

I recommend the short book available online through a quick Google search-

“Meditation: A Short Course to Higher Consciousness” by Stephen Knapp.

I knew a lot of fighters who used do yoga and I’ve gotten my ass kicked way too many times by people who’ve done a lot of yoga. It improves strength and flexibility while making you a lot less injury prone.

I’ve never done yoga, but it’s not “girly” and there’s nothing about doing yoga that makes anyone a pussy. The guys saying shit like that have their heads stuck up their own ass.

Hell yes. I’ve yoga for over 20 years, and when I got into martial arts found that a lot of the conditioning and training exercises were very, very similar. And it helps prevent injuries from being as serious as they could have been.

The indian swamis are known for levitating. This can only be done when achieving an unheard of ‘delta’ brainwave state. In alpha the body and brain are on auto-pilot or sleeping. In beta to gamma, you’re either working out, fucking or taking the SAT. Your brainwave state permiates your entire body raising or lowering its vibrational energy depending on the state. In higher state, every molecule in body vibrates with an infitessimally small amplitude but at such a high frequency that your body approaches the speed of light while remaining stationary. Your actual ‘movement’ isn’t linear, but oscillatory. So you’re just ‘buzzing’ real fast or ‘vibrating’ AT LIGHT SPEED. As you know light passes right through matter that’s travelling near light speed, so the body would appear to become opaque and then ‘invisible’. The levitation, well, matter travelling at light speed isn’t solid matter anymore and is unaffected by gravity. Houdini could take a pretty good punch to the gut, but he had to first ‘buzz-up’ and mentally prepare for it.

I seriously considered penning an essay “Have Women Ruined Yoga?” from the premise of women’s narcissism as a roadblock to men’s development.

But fact is idle, privileged white women popularized Yoga in the West.

That should not dissuade men from learning this beneficial physical culture.

And some guys will claim Yoga class is a venue for meeting chicks. Maybe so but one would have to deal with female narcissism and competitiveness which would be a distraction from the manly goal of self-improvement.

Unless you are the Rastafarian Yoga Instructor Dude in colorful pants and dreadlocks. Could be a potential gold-mine for building a harem. Probably beats a career filling out TPS reports at Encorpera.

I don’t know any women who do yoga outside of a class setting. They’ve turned it into a “girls thing.” But guys I know who do yoga will do it on their lunch break, at home, and on vacation. Just like strength training and staying fit. . . Guys take it seriously. Women don’t.
But it’s one of the best exercises out there. It gets you fit and strong for life.
I know strength builders who can’t do hand stand push ups. Most of the yoga guys I know can.

Definitely it’s been corrupted and “Westernized.” There ARE sitting and lying positions for meditating, but you’re supposed to be meditating in all the postures. Autogenics and Kinesthetic Stabilization exercises are now being found to work miracles. Yoga was the original and still the best. Tai Chi and martial arts evolved from Yoga as a way to fit the Asian mindset. It’s not for pussies or lazy people. I do Chi Kung while doing Yoga and get crazy energy and strength. But when you try to talk to Yoga people about incorporating Chinese meditation into it they act like you’ve commited a crime or something.

When I was struggling with depression/anxiety/bullshit I started a simple routine of sitting in silence for 30 minutes some time in the morning. The very first time I felt heaps better. After a week I was sleeping better, having an easier time talking to people, plus I experienced all the benefits outlined above. I haven’t done much reading on the subject- haven’t felt the need. Just taking a half hour to sit an breathe keeps me feeling sharp and clear-headed. Someone busier than I am could probably get away with 20 minutes, but who doesn’t have 30 minutes a day to invest in their health? Stress is a killer, but the cure is free.

Oh yeah? Tell that to VanDamme, Segal, Rambo, and many other notable badasses who would “meditate” before confronting their arch-rivals in an epic battle or competing in the ultimate “Kumintang” death-match.

True meditation comes from within for the most part, but I would like to add to the article that you must literally “go” your own way to find how to meditate. For myself, I found it in the mountains and deserts and canyons of New Mexico and Texas as a late teenager. Nothing makes you a man, and a human, more than a little one-on-one time with mother nature and father time to test your mettle and see the strut of your sails.

I have only met one woman who I would consider to be mentally on par with me, and thats just spiritually and collectively, not in other features such as academically or physically, and she was not from America. They are out there, but should you fortunately come across such a suitable mate, you just have to show them that you’re a real man, and they will submit before your holy manliness.

Good sleep is all you need, folks. Best restorative sleep is before 1pm, so go to bed as early as possible and rise at dawn. Then you can face anything the day throws at you instead of burying your head in the arse to hide from the problems.

Spending time alone outdoors in nature is also good. But you don’t need to shut your eyes and close the mind off, quite the opposite open your senses and experience how busy-busy all creatures in fact are.

At work, when I take my 15 or 30 minute break, instead of doing thi on my phone, I meditate.

I also do deep breathing in the car, while I’m taking a shit, before I go to bed, during idle times. I do it anywhere or everywhere.

I hate when people say they don’t have time. The mind is just afraid to be with itself and that’s why people would say that. Break your fears and just sit and focus on your breathing. Do that for 2 to 5 minutes and watch how different you feel.

Go on YouTube if you need a Guided Meditation or guided progressive muscle relaxation to help you do it properly.

Stop the psych meds and other narcotics and get into what your body naturally needs to focus, which is YOUrself.

Great article. While I have not meditated consistently, I am often more
productive and focused on activities. The best way to think about
meditation is to equate your mind to a computer.
If a computer is left on all the time processing information, it overheats and slows down. When you shut it down for a while, the computer cools and performs faster when started up again. The same happens with your mind and meditation – you’re
giving your mind a break and letting it cool down.

The self reflection aspect and breathing are so very important for us to do each day.

I’ve seen some other responders note how important it is for us to allow our minds to rest. This is true. Like running defrag on a computer, we get to re-organise, compress and put things into their proper place.

Breathing is vitally important for our whole being yet it is something that most of us do very poorly. I’d like to recommend that people have a look at a book called “Let every breath”. I cannot recall the author but it is a documentation of breathing techniques and exercises used within the Russian martial art, Systema.

Be careful with this. It can be crux. I know the cult of positivity likes preaching, but sometimes reality is negative. Too many meditators hop on the bandwagon and meditate the negativity away. The problem then balloons to epic proportions.

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